Nothing Says “Mother” Like “Badass”

I’m steeling myself for the “badass” onslaught this Sunday. You know, in which all manner of well-meaning Americans take to social media and proclaim their love for Mom by brandishing the B-word. To wit, here are some Mother’s Day tribute tweets from last year:

Maybe I’m old-fashioned—no, assuredly, I’m old-fashioned—but I would never, ever describe my mother as “badass.” This is, in large part, because I am a language prude—at least in a mass-market, non–premium-cable context. I’m still recovering from the childhood trauma of hearing a radio station out of Boston, WCOZ, advertise itself as the home of “kickass rock ’n’ roll.” (That was allowed by the F.C.C.?) I can barely stomach the fact that Chloë Grace Moretz, when she was only 13, starred in a movie called Kick-Ass. (That was allowed by the M.P.A.A.?) So, this notion of calling your mother a badass—who on earth would do that? Especially on Mother’s Day, of all days?

Well, evidently, everyone but me. I asked Twitter’s communications manager, Alexandra Valasek, if I was imagining the new social-media epidemic of filial badassery: was the “badass” uptick real, or was I just cherry-picking tweets to uphold my alarmist thesis? After conducting an examination of tweets from the year 2013 in which the words “badass” and “mom” were used in the same 140-character message (allowing also for such “mom” variants such as “mother” and “moms”), Valasek informed me, via e-mail, “There was actually a large spike in those tweets on Mother’s Day last year: 10 times the daily average of ‘mom + badass’ tweets.”

So it’s true: “badass” is basically a Hallmark word now, its bestowal the latter-day equivalent of sending a pastel-colored drugstore card and a hanging fuschia. Quite a long road traveled for a term whose origins lie in the butch, pulpy 1950s, when, per the Oxford English Dictionary, it described “a tough, aggressive, intimidating, or uncompromising person.” The O.E.D.’s earliest citation of the word (in the phrase “a hard-nose badass type”) comes from a 1955 letter written from prison by James Blake, a florid ruffian with literary aspirations who had struck up a correspondence with the novelist Nelson Algren.

In the years since, “badass” has been re-purposed as a term of admiration, memorably in Melvin Van Peebles’s 1971 film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, and, more recently, in feminist discourse. The Texts from Hillary Tumblr, a meme sensation when it launched in 2012, was heralded by the Web site Jezebel with the headline “Hillary Clinton Is Badass and Now Has the Tumblr to Prove It.” Elizabeth Warren, too, is regularly hailed as badass; a Clinton–Warren 2016 ticket might conceivably warrant the Van Peebles-ian epithet “baadasssss.” The musician and Sonic Youth co-founder Kim Gordon is another magnet for the word; her April 28 birthday prompted Gordon to re-tweet the birthday wishes of a fan who cited her as “the most badass human being out there.”

Look, I get it: “badass” now celebrates battle-tested resilience, righteousness, and strength. And my mother has all those things in spades. Strongly principled? Check! She campaigned as a member of the League of Women Voters for the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, and today volunteers at an inner-city school. Physically fearless? Check! She swims daily and took up open-sea sailing in her 70s. Intellectually formidable? Check! She spent her entire career working as a microbiologist, breaking into her field at a time when it allowed few women.

Nevertheless, “badass” is still too coarse a word for me to apply to my beloved mother. I’m not comfortable with its component parts, “bad” and “ass,” being so proximate to her. And, believe me, she wouldn’t take kindly to the label. She’s fierce, proud, and dignified, with a deep sense of propriety about language. In other words, she’s a total bad—oh, never mind.